Wednesday, April 14, 2010

A document fished out of a California state university trash bin last week has prompted a state investigation into the university's foundation arm and its refusal to disclose details related to Sarah Palin's upcoming speech at the school.

On Tuesday, California Attorney General Jerry Brown said his office would look into the finances of the California State University, Stanislaus Foundation, as well as allegations that the nonprofit organization violated public disclosure laws by keeping details of Palin's contract secret.

Palin is scheduled to speak at a June 25 gala hosted by the foundation to mark the university's 50th anniversary.

Brown's investigation was prompted, in part, by a group of CSU Stanislaus students who retrieved five pages of the contract from a campus trash bin last Friday after hearing administrators were engaged in shredding documents.

Hmmm. I have a few questions. (1) If the contract wasn't supposed to be found by anyone, why wasn't it shredded? It seems like this was purposely planted. (2) How often do students at CSU explore the campus trash bins?

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Associated Baptist Press has a report on the recent death of Michael Spencer, whose blog has been consistently near the top of all Christian blogs. His blog was certainly a regular read for me, and I mourn his passing.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by distorting a man’s perception of his wife. Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined. Consider a narcotic so insidious that it evades serious scientific study and legislative action for decades, thriving instead under the ever-expanding banner of the First Amendment.

According to an online statistics firm, an estimated 40 million people use this drug on a regular basis. It doesn’t come in pill form. It can’t be smoked, injected, or snorted. And yet neurological data suggest its effects on the brain are strikingly similar to those of synthetic drugs. Indeed, two authorities on the neurochemistry of addiction, Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth, claim it is the ability of this drug to influence all three pleasure systems in the brain — arousal, satiation, and fantasy — that makes it “thepièce derésistance among the addictions.”